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Last Updated: Wednesday, 31 August
2005, 11:14 GMT 12:14 UK

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Environment key to helping poor

By Richard Black

BBC News website environment
correspondent

Environmental protection can reward people and
wildlife

The
key Millennium Goal of halving poverty in a decade cannot be met
without better environmental protection, according to a new
report.

The World Resources 2005 document says that most of the world's
poor depend on nature for their income.

Its authors say a focus on aid has taken attention away from more
complex issues such as the environment.

The report is endorsed by the UN, and comes two weeks before a
major summit to review progress on the Goals.

In the Millennium Goals, the environment
was treated as an afterthought

Jonathan Lash, World Resources
Institute

Pertinent
publication

World Resources is a biennial publication from the US-based
research group the World Resources Institute (WRI).

The release of this year's edition, sub-titled Managing
Ecosystems to Fight Poverty, is particularly pertinent, coming as it
does in the run-up to the UN World Summit, which will see
representatives of more than 190 countries gather in New York to
review progress on the Millennium Goals adopted by world leaders
five years ago.

The first and possibly most important of those goals is to halve
the number of people living in poverty, defined as less than US$1
per day, by 2015. This a particular issue for sub-Saharan Africa.

Income and the environment: win-win
solutions

In detail

"We have
the Millennium Goals summit coming up, we have Tony Blair making
Africa and poverty a major theme within the G8 - there's never been
a time when poverty has been higher on the agenda," the WRI's
President Jonathan Lash told the BBC News website.

"But if we don't make the key linkages between poverty, the
environment and good governance, it will be impossible to achieve
the poverty target.

"Seventy-five percent of the world's poor are rural poor, who
depend directly on natural systems for their livelihood."

Making the case

The report presents five case studies to reinforce its argument
that environmental protection and poverty alleviation go hand in
hand.

in Namibia, handing communities the power to conserve wildlife
led to increased incomes from employment and tourism, and a
recovery in wildlife numbers

in India's Maharashtra state, better management of water
resources through measures like tree planting removed dependence
on water imports and improved incomes

in northern Tanzania, restoring traditional land management
with plants improved diets, raised incomes and brought back
wildlife

in several Indonesian islands, training local people to
document and report illegal logging protected forests and allowed
the growth of activities such as river fishing which depend on
trees for their sustainability

in Fiji, encouraging communities to put quotas on shellfish
catches returned stocks to a sustainable condition, ensuring
long-term incomes.

Demanding a quick fix

But Jonathan Lash is pessimistic that the link between
environmental protection and poverty is understood at the highest
level.

Africa's
aid, trade and debt

"In
the Millennium Goals, the environment was treated as an
afterthought," he told the BBC News website.

"And I think there has been a tendency to focus on big
global-scale issues like aid, trade and debt relief; these things
are necessary but not sufficient.

"Focussing on the needs of the rural poor is harder because it
tends to go one community at a time, and it doesn't give the quick
payback that I think we sometimes demand of global leaders - you
know, 'do something big that we can see on our TV screens tonight'."

But unless the importance of the environment is grasped and acted
upon, the report concludes that the key Millennium Goal on poverty
will not be met.

Disappearing world

A foreword co-written by senior figures in the World Bank and the
United Nations Environment and Development Programmes notes the
devastating figures which emerged earlier this year from a four-year
study of global environmental decline, the Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment:

organisms are disappearing at 100 to 1,000 times the
"background levels" seen in the fossil record

a third of all amphibians, a fifth of mammals and an eighth of
all birds are threatened with extinction

some 35% of mangroves and about 20% of corals have
gone.

THE MDGs: ON TARGET?

July
2003: UN says Millennium Goal on poverty may be missed by 50
years

January
2004: World Economic Forum concludes that attempts to meet
Goals are 'faltering'

January
2005: Report for UN says poverty target will be missed unless
science is better harnessed

April
2005: World Bank & IMF call for urgent action to enable
poorest countries to meet Goals

June
2005: UN says poverty falling globally but millions in
sub-Saharan Africa getting poorer

"If
the natural resource base is not managed for the long term, if it is
exploited and polluted for short-term gain, it will never provide
the fuel for economic development on the scale demanded to relieve
poverty," the World Resources foreword says.

This is the latest in a stream of reports which have publicly
doubted the will and ability of the global community to ensure the
Goals are met, particularly in Africa, though it is unique so far in
linking that lack of progress to environmental concerns.

There is also concern that leaders of the developed world have
chosen to downgrade the importance of the Millennium Goals at the
World Summit, which opens on 14 September, and focus instead on
security and terrorism.

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RELATED BBC LINKS:

G8
communiques in full (PDF)

RELATED INTERNET LINKS:

World Resources
Institute

UN
Millennium Goals

United Nations
Environment Programme

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